How to Implement Customer Service Training With Employees

by Owen E. Richason IV, Demand Media

Training employees in customer service is essential to run a business.

Call-Center image by Yvonne Bogdanski from Fotolia.com

Customer service is perhaps the most vital part of conducting business as it reflects directly on the company and how it is able to meet the needs of patrons. Implementing customer service training with employees requires a solid understanding of your customer’s needs and expectations as well as being able to meet and surpass those needs and expectations through consistent, positively reinforced training. To implement customer service training with employees, you will need to identify your customer’s needs, assess your employee’s skills, design and implement a training vehicle, and constant reevaluation of customer service delivery.

Step 1

Identify your customer’s needs. To implement effective customer service training with employees, you first need to know what your customers expect from your staff and what their needs generally are. This can be accomplished by giving each customer a comment card, setting up a ratings or feedback section on your company’s website, and/or asking customers about their experience with your company on their last visit and past visits.

You also may elect to hire a survey firm that conducts customer satisfaction surveys. For instance, Allegiance, a customer service research firm, offers a number of products for gathering information about your customers and how they interact with your employees (See Resources).

Step 2

Evaluate each employee’s skills and skill level. This can be accomplished simply by watching how an employee interacts with customers and what level of service they offer. Some employees will be natural salespersons and posses the skills to up-sell customers with little effort. Others will be better at problem solving or pre-emptive problem solving in which they are able to identify when a customer is unhappy or unsatisfied and address the situation before it becomes unmanageable.

Study your employees and identify which have the best skill sets for a particular customer service need, such as establishing a rapport and up-selling. Conduct regular meetings allowing, each employee to showcase and explain how they carry out their particular skill set.

Design and implement a training method. This can be done just as in the example of allowing employees to individually demonstrate their skill set and how they execute it effectively. You can also record via video or audio transcription a text of the employee’s presentation or use it to compile a customer service manual.

You can also have experienced employees or supervisors or managers shadow new employees, and train them on the job. On-the-job training provides real-time and live situational awareness of how customers interact with staff and what their expectations are from said employees.

In the alternative, you can have a professional business consultant or customer service training agency write an employee handbook or customer service manual that details protocols for how and when to greet a customer, how long to wait to ask follow-up questions, how to resolve customer disputes.

Step 4

Reevaluate your employee’s customer service relations on a consistent basis. Employee evaluations should be given at least twice a year to as many as once a quarter. You want to allow the employee to give feedback on their evaluation and by the same token, allow them input on how effective they believe the customer service training to be.

You want to ensure each employee is complying with the company’s customer service protocol. For instance, WalMart employees are required to greet any customer that comes within 20 feet of an employee within seven to 10 seconds.

About the Author

Owen Richason grew up working in his family's small contracting business. He later became an outplacement consultant, then a retail business consultant. Richason is a former personal finance and business writer for "Tampa Bay Business and Financier." He now writes for various publications, websites and blogs.

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